Deep Sea News

to deceive

I knew of the scene in Malcolm X, where Denzel Washington states “Every election year, these politicians are sent up here to pacify us,” he says. “You’ve been hoodwinked. Bamboozled.”  Apparently and totally missed by myself when it actually occurred, Obama during his campaign (at the very of this clip) used similar terminology which gave the fodder to the right to make the rather bold claim Obama was a racist.  Hmmmm.

From BrianBerlin.net

from the 17th century, it described the Spanish custom of hoisting false flags to deceive (bamboozle) enemies.

Also see Word Detective (scroll down) for the potential origns of the word.

The latest viral video is from the sewer under Cameron Village in Raleigh, NC.  The mysterious creatures found are nothing short of disgusting and spectacular.  This video has made its way to Video Sift and various cryptozoology sites.  Speculations on the nature of this creature run from bryozoans, cnidarians, slime molds, and some mysterious alien creature here to suck out our brains. Well let me say first that it is none of the above. I can think of no freshwater Cnidarian that looks anything like this.  It lacks the characteristic delineations that would indicate individual zooids in the colony and frankly the retracting of finger-like tentacles doesn’t seem like a bryozan characteristic (see the pictures at this site). In fact, I have poked a lot of invertebrates as lab instructor for invertebrate zoology and as a graduate student just for shits and giggles and none of the mentioned candidates would respond like this. So back to square one…

You shouldn’t trust me however…you should trust an expert in one of the aforementioned groups.  Enter stage right Dr. Timothy S. Wood who is an expert on freshwater bryozoa and an officer with the International Bryozoology Association.  I sent along the video and this was his reponse…

Thanks for the video – I had not see it before. No, these are not bryozoans!  They are clumps of annelid worms, almost certainly tubificids (Naididae, probably genus Tubifex). Normally these occur in soil and sediment, especially at the bottom and edges of polluted streams. In the photo they have apparently entered a pipeline somehow, and in the absence of soil they are coiling around each other. The contractions you see are the result of a single worm contracting and then stimulating all the others to do the same almost simultaneously, so it looks like a single big muscle contracting. Interesting video.

More video of Tubifex

Over the years, I’ve marveled at the ways and means of different scientists. Some have a career that’s focused like a laser beam, boring through the impenetrable mysteries of oceanography or evolution. Others paint with a broad brush on a large canvas, dabble in things of interest, or follow a trail to its natural conclusion, then shift to something new.

At one time, I put Dr. Callum Roberts of the University of York in the latter group. Now, I think he’s the former. His laser beam is different, so its hard to spot. Its in orbit around our Ocean Planet. The mystery he unravels is human impacts to the marine environment. Yet, in every sad story, he offers a glimmer of hope- marine protected areas.

Callum Roberts is one of the great ocean communicators, but his science does the talking. The research has a quality of immediacy, and direct application. Recent work with colleagues on the history of bottom trawling in the British Isles is a good example.

They discovered that 19th-century catches included millions of shellfish, along with corals, sponges, sea anemones and other creatures that grow out of the sea bed…. Fishermen describe in the records how their catches changed once trawlers had been through an area, with hooks and nets picking up vast mats of seaweed and other debris ripped from the bottom.

Roberts and his colleagues dug into fisheries records and captain’s logs to find that early trawls retrieved significantly more biomass, particularly oysters. They link the loss of shellfish to the color of the sea.  The ocean used to be blue, because oysters, tunicates, and corals filtered the water, but now they’re gone, and the water is a dirty gray. The only big mussels that remain are in a military harbor, where trawling is prohibited.

Does your ocean look like this?

Read more in the Time Online stories “The sea before bottom trawling” and “British sea bed trawled into a wasteland.”

If you’d like learn more about Callum Roberts, check out his papers in Science, and visit his lab online.

Hat tip to the Marine Conservation Blog.

Folks must have been shocked last week to hear outgoing whaling Commissioner Dr. Bill Hogarth say he was convinced “there would be less whales killed if we didn’t have a moratorium,” in reference to the unregulated nature of Japanese scientific whaling. Bureaucratic insights like these are hard to reconcile, but times they are a-changing.

The New York Times carries an interesting OpEd that seeks to provide a reality check on the International Whaling Commission:

At this point in its troubled history, it appears that the main function of the International Whaling Commission, which met last week on the Portuguese island of Madeira, is to ensure its own survival — and with it, the survival of a 40-year-old loophole-ridden “ban” on commercial whaling that is not really a ban at all.

The Op-Ed article highlights issues of non-compliance, and lack of enforcement (outside of renegades). One particular aspect is likely to raise your eyebrows, the high price of whale meat:

the monetary value of whales — as much as $100,000 for a single minke whale — almost guarantees that they will be sold commercially, whether they’re killed for “research” or subsistence. Meanwhile, the appetite to resume open, aboveboard commercial whaling grows stronger, especially as whale numbers — though they remain far below historic levels — recover.

If the intention of the Editorial was to sow doubt, I think it worked. Is fisheries politics a never ending downward spiral? There must be some way out of here…

From the New York Times…

The House passed legislation on Friday intended to address global warming and transform the way the nation produces and uses energy.  The vote was the first time either house of Congress had approved a bill meant to curb the heat-trapping gases scientists have linked to climate change. The legislation, which passed despite deep divisions among Democrats, could lead to profound changes in many sectors of the economy, including electric power generation, agriculture, manufacturing and construction. The bill’s passage, by 219 to 212, with 44 Democrats voting against it, also established a marker for the United States when international negotiations on a new climate change treaty begin later this year.

A step of the right direction, but many conservation organizations feel the legistation falls well short of what where we need to be and well behind the EU.  I also find it disheartening that admist the general public support and unequivocal evidence for global warming that the vote was 219-212.

Dunkleosteus skull at the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History

Way before even your great-great-grandpappy was born and Ohio was ocean instead of cornfields, it was the “Age of the Fishes”.  During this Devonian (400-360 million years ago), the placoderms, giant, shark-like, armored fishes, ruled the oceans.  Among the largest and most fearsome of these were the arthrodires, the joint necks.  The lovely pet above is Dunkleosteus at 25 feet in length.  I think we are going to need more butter! Given all the weight of the armor, Dunkleosteus was probably a slow swimmer. But hey when you are that big and armored how fast do you need to be?

Illustration by Steveoc 86 and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported

Instead of teeth, those bony plates you see above would shear past one another forming vicious cutting edges.  In 2007 Anderson and Westneat, built a computer model based on this big boy’s bones and muscle attachements.  The two authors determined that a large individual could rip apart its prey with a force of 8000lbs at the tip of the jaws and with more than 11000lbs at the back of the dental plates. The authors conclude that “This bite force capability is the greatest of all living or fossil fishes and is among the most powerful bites in animals.”

Illustration by Arthur Weasley and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported

Anderson, P., & Westneat, M. (2007). Feeding mechanics and bite force modelling of the skull of Dunkleosteus terrelli, an ancient apex predator Biology Letters, 3 (1), 76-79 DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2006.0569

A shark ray at the Newport Aquarium. Photo courtesy of the Newport Aquarium

Finding my self in Cincinnati for a conference, I couldn’t help myself from heading across the river into Kentucky to the Newport Aquarium.  This aquarium is truly a gem of the midland.  The entrance proclaims “water is the blanket of the earth” and indeed the aquarium highlights the biodiversity of this cover.

With so many great exhibits at the aquarium, I find difficulty in knowing what to discuss.  To limit myself, I will only mention a few unique things about the Newport Aquarium that make it worthy of a visit…freshwater biodiversity, shark rays, and giant isopods.

The Newport Aquarium spends a great deal of time playing to their strengths highlighting the biodiversity of freshwater, an exhibit often absent or sadly limited in many other aquariums.  The fish diversity of Congo, Tanganyyika, Rio Negro, Mekong, and the Ganges is there proudly displayed.  Also exhibited are fishes all sizes and forms of the Licking River and the Mississippi.  The Licking River is an ~320km tributary of the Ohio and a native muskie, a large uncommon freshwater fish of North America, habitat. As a side note, the river supports about 50 species of mussel, 11 endangered.  My birding friends also inform the Licking also host an unusually high number of migrating fowl as well.

As you move from out of the freshwater exhibits you transition into salt marshes, tidal rivers, river deltas, mangroves, and grass beds.  This represents another strength of the aquarium, the emphasis on systems and communities with linkages between.  Highlights of the exhibits included a 4-eyes (with eyes on the top of the head that are divided in two different parts allowing the fish to see above and below the water), archer fish (which can spit streams of water to knock insects of off branches above the water’s surface), mud skippers (an amphibious fish which can walk on their fins and breath out of water, the latter through the ability to breath through the skin and retain air bubble in their gill chambers), and the New Guinea snake head turtle (a turtle blessed with a extraordinarily long neck)

I was also lucky enough to catch a feeding of the shark rays.  Technically a member of the rays, Rajiformes, their 2.5m form is an elegant hybrid encompassing shark characteristics.  They feed along the bottom, preying on crustaceans and mollusks.  Given their vulnerable status by the IUCN, the Newport Aquarium’s shark ray breeding program, started in 2007, highlights its conservation message.

Of course the best part was the Giant Isopods!  An exhibit contained five of the magnificent beasts.  Although there was little movement among the bunch, I know a voracious scavenger lurks there waiting for the next food fall.  Too bad the aquarium didn’t have isopod feedings.  If you love Giant Isopods as much as I do, and I know you do, then a trip to Newport Aquarium is a must.

A shark ray at the Newport Aquarium. Photo courtesy of the Newport Aquarium

This animation from Daniel Brown at Biochemical Soul makes me come close to actually liking echinoderms.  Well..at least I still like them more than mammals.  Seriously, a great animation that clearly illustrates the development of starfish.

Basketstars are enigmatic denizens of the deep. They are broadly distributed in the world’s oceans from the Artic to the Antarctic, occurring as shallow as the shallow subtidal. They can grow to 2-3 feet across, often found associated with deep-sea coral, like this Gorgonocephalus sp. above. Basketstars are suspension feeders, so their feeding mode is similar to deep corals, which may explain their co-occurrence.

Chris Mah’s Echinoblog has details, and tipped me to a nice paper by Rosenberg et al 2005 explaining the biology of Gorgonocephalus in Norwegian fjords. The image above is from the Finding Coral photostream at Flickr.

Its summertime folks, and it seems like everyone is either heading out to sea, or returning from a recent expedition. If not that, its a conference. Craig reported last week from Evolution 2009, and Kevin’s off to a meeting for the Biogeography of Chemosythetic Ecosystems (ChEss) in Japan. I’m still stuck here in Texas writing my dissertation, but I’ll try to mix it up with random happenings so y’all have something interesting to read.

Are you ready for another Expedition? The Census of Marine Life on Seamounts (CenSeam) group is asking you to follow along with RV Tangaroa, the research vessel of New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, as they sail south – uncovering seamount communities never before seen. On June 12th CenSeam returned to the Graveyard, the location of the very first CenSeam voyage. Check out the scientist stories and seafloor maps. There’s more on deep-corals, from researcher Di Tracey if, like me, you just can’t get enough.

The image above is one of several interesting shots from the Graveyard website.